Building global strategies

Mastering new challenges

Building global strategies: Mastering new challenges

In this stream, we will examine important new strategic challenges for the global firm and how to deal with them effectively. These challenges include: (i) market opportunities migrating to rapidly emerging economies in the East; (ii) the long shadow of the financial crisis and the rising prominence of sovereign wealth funds; and (iii) the urgent imperative to deal with climate change and to include a larger number of stakeholders in the firm's growth strategies. The stream devotes a session to each of these challenges. In the final two sessions, we will explore the strategy process that is needed to deal with these challenges effectively - the first from the standpoint of country managers and the concluding session from the standpoint of corporate leaders.

I am Bala Chakravarthy, the OWP stream director for the stream, Building Global Strategies, Mastering New Challenges. Of course when you talk about global strategies there are lots and lots of challenges, in a short program like what we are going to have we can only talk about 3 main challenges. Challenge number 1: both the markets and the resources are migrating to rapidly emerging economies and companies need new business models to cope with that challenge. It’s both an opportunity as well as a challenge. The Second is of course climate change and poverty. We are going to take a test case in Bangladesh which suffers from both and what can multinational companies do to alleviate both the climate change issue as well as the poverty issue. Once again we are going to put some pressure on the business models that companies use. And the last one is about financing. Sovereign wealth funds control 2 to 15% of big named companies such as CityGroup, HSBC, Sony, MGM, what does this mean for the leaders of these companies and how can we take advantage of this new kind of financing? When we get all these challenges, the question is, there is going to be a different role for country managers and regional managers, so we are going to spend some time talking about that and finally of course, the leader, the CEO, what does the new business model mean for a new operations process and systems and how does he empower the country manager and the regional manager. So we are going to be talking about some very exciting issues, very quickly. I hope you will come and enjoy this. Thank you very much.